My Backup Tools

My two primary backup tools are Chronsync for my iMac and Smartsync Pro for my Windows devices. I’ve only recently began using Chronosync, but I am impressed with its speed and ease of configuration. I’ve used Syncpro for years, being prompted to do so by Walt Mossberg’s endorsement of it in one of his older articles. Both my Chronosync and Syncpro backups are to an external Firelite hard drive.

I’d love to hear from you on what you use for backup.

I also recently began using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for selected backups. For example, I use it to backup my blog to Amazon’s secure servers (in addition to backing it up to my Firelite drive).

Amazon S3 appears to be intended for developers, but as far as I can tell anyone can use it. I like the fact that it gives me secure offsite data storage: I have used Amazon for many years and am confident in their data security. I also like the fact that S3 is very cheap.

Setting up an S3 account was easy. Learning how to use it took a bit of effort. My starting point was some of super-geek Paul Stamatiou’s material, starting with his how-to on being a website performance junkie.

Doing a little digging from there led me to download Cockpit, which let me connect to S3 using my two secure, encrypted access keys. Once connected, I used Cockpit to set up a few “buckets” in my S3 account. These are somewhat analogous to folders, but they are global, and each one has a separate access control, defaulting to accessible only to the owner of the bucket.

One of the advantages to using Cockpit, available for Mac (or ‘Nix) or Windows, is that it lets you assign sensible names to the buckets. Some other tools that connect to S3 use the S3 default naming conventions, which assigns unique alphanumeric keys as the names. With Cockpit, you can assign a name that makes sense to you.

Once I had set up a bucket for backing up my blog, I downloaded my blog to my iMac’s hard drive and then uploaded from there to the S3 using Cockpit:

The cost for uploading these 86 MegaBytes? A few pennies:

(Note that my blog has 86 MB because of all of the music uploads I have done. Otherwise, it would be less than 5 MB.)

In addition to using Cockpit, I am learning to use the Amazon S3 Firefox Extension, which is just an extension for the Firefox browser that will let you connect to Amazon S3 and manage your files (uploading and so forth). In some respects, Cockpit is easier to use, although it has the downside that I have to run it within a Terminal on my iMac. I use Terminal to switch to the directory where the Cockpit.sh script is located and run “sudo bash cockpit.sh”. Windows users have an easier time of it, and only need to double-click the bat file.

I doubt right now that I will use S3 for a full system backup of either my Mac or Windows systems. Primary reason: upload time. Uploading several gigabytes of data would be very time consuming. The cost would be fine, but the time involved would be more than I would want to bother with. (Of course, if I cleaned all the crap off of my hard drives, there would be less to back up: I probably have at least a gigabyte of application downloads that I could store on a DVD: text editors, sync tools, and other utilities.)

However, I do think it is a good idea to use S3 (or similar services) to backup really critical data. Not only does it give you an offsite backup, in case of catastrophe, but it gets you accustomed to having data “in the cloud,” so to speak. I suspect that, in time, we will all be living with data in the cloud (and applications, too). That is probably a topic all by itself, and I will give some thought to writing about it later.

I am also using S3 to supply some images for this site. More on that on another day.